


call of the void

by DrowningInStarlight



Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Gen, Tarot, this was my piece for the aurora blackbox zine!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-26
Updated: 2020-11-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:16:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27728003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DrowningInStarlight/pseuds/DrowningInStarlight
Summary: When Brian is a child, he dreams of a man with a metal face.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 24





	call of the void

**Author's Note:**

> this was my piece for the aurora blackbox mechs zine, and now sales have finished on that i'm posting it up here too!! thanks to everyone who bought and worked on the zine, it was a great time :DD

_The Fool is a dreamer. They watch for the patterns of the universe, but don’t know what they mean yet. Everything is new and exciting, and there’s something that they don’t understand that always calls them onwards. They want to understand. The Fool is the first and the last. Watcher and watched. Follower and followed._

When Brian is a child, he dreams of a man with a metal face. 

He’s always been inclined to dreaming, so often that sometimes he can’t tell what’s actually real and what’s just another figment of his subconscious. Sometimes the world doesn’t quite seem to be able to work it out either. He dreams things into existence, or perhaps it’s the other way round— existence dreams with him. People call him an old soul, saying he carries wisdom of ancients, but he just wants an uninterrupted night’s sleep. He’s tired. He’s always so tired. 

So, he dreams of a man with a metal face and a flower in his hat. The man looks down at him sadly, a sadness that Brian feels like he recognises. Everything around them is dark, but still somehow light catches on the copper of his eyelashes whenever he blinks, like distant constellations.

“Maybe I should tell you to never look up at the stars in the first place,” the man tells Brian. Everything is in sharp focus now, apart from the darkness, and Brian thinks for a moment that he can hear the sound of a distant, steady rhythm, like a… like a heartbeat. “But I won’t. I don’t think it would do any good. Not really.” 

Brian tries to respond, but he wakes up before he can say a word. There are tears on his cheeks, and he doesn’t know why. 

_The Magician is a bridge. They have tools at their disposal, and they have the will to use them to make new connections. They are all action, making progress in leaps and bounds. Not only do they thrive in change, they orchestrate it, and are changed in turn._

Brian doesn’t know who he is, but he knows he wants to help people. That has to count for something, right? He has skills he can use, skills that no one else here even begins to possess. It would be wrong not to use them. He’s not a bad person. He isn’t a bad person now, at least, and maybe he doesn’t know who he is or where he came from but he isn’t a bad person now and that’s what matters. Right? 

Here’s the thing— death is supposed to be the end. He knows that, everyone knows that. But Brian is so tired of dreaming, so he turned his nightmares into work, work that he carries out every time he’s shaken out of sleep by a vision that leaves him gasping for breath. 

It had taken him frighteningly little time to work it out, in the end, and now he’s sitting in his lab with the antidote for death in his hands and he doesn’t know what to do. He feels dizzy with it, his heart beating too fast, his hands shaking. 

The priest’s daughter had looked like she’d been crying, but there was only steel in her eyes as she looked at Brian and said “You’re the only one who can save my father.” 

He’d shaken his head, told her he couldn’t, he shouldn’t— 

But now, he sits in his lab, surrounded by the ghosts of his failed experiments, and he can’t decide— How is he supposed to decide? Is it worth the cost? Is the cost too much? How does this story end? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know. 

He is going to use the cure, he knows that much. It’s inevitable, sooner or later. Maybe he is a bad person after all. Or maybe he’s a good one. 

Brian doesn’t think he knows how to tell anymore. He clutches the secret to escaping death in his unsteady hands and strides out of the lab. 

_The Wheel of Fortune signals ends and beginnings. It’s change at its most seductive, wild and unpredictable. Spin the wheel, take the chance. Fortunes and failures, feasts and famines, what is life but a never ending metamorphosis?_

Only Drumbot Brian’s heart is beating now. His hands don’t shake anymore. He leaves death among the stars as frost prickles across his skin. He leaves death with Doctor Carmilla— 

They all do, these strange and awful people. And then Doctor Carmilla is gone, and they’re free. On the Aurora, time isn’t the only thing Drumbot Brian and the rest of the Mechanisms have in infinite quantities. They also have distance, space, the whole world spread out around them. They drift from galaxy to galaxy, seeing what the universe has to offer. Turns out, it’s everything and nothing all at once, all wrapped up in the stories they take to telling and the stories that are lost forever. 

The universe is inescapable, and the universe is theirs. Throughout it all, there’s a rhythm of a drum in Brian’s head, sounding something like a heartbeat. 

He still dreams hazy, feverish visions of lives he doesn’t remember and futures that perhaps will never exist. He dreams of suns and wars and once, a young boy, who looks up at him, sad, until he disappears. 

_In the end, the Hanged Man is both blessed and cursed._

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr as [drowninginstarlights!](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/drowninginstarlights)


End file.
